5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Inato’s Journey Building a Healthcare Marketplace
Sometimes the best path to success requires starting over completely. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Kourosh Davarpanah shared how Inato evolved from a struggling SaaS product to a thriving clinical trial marketplace. Here are the essential go-to-market lessons from their journey:
- Don’t Be Afraid to Reset Everything
The most crucial decision in Inato’s journey came four years in, when they made a complete pivot. As Kourosh explains, “We pivoted after four years. And when I say pivoted, it was a hard pivot. We went back to no clients, no revenue, no product, nothing.” While terrifying, this reset enabled them to tackle the problem from first principles, leading to explosive growth: “We did more revenue on year two with the new model than we did on year four of the previous one.”
- Build Trust Through Industry Expertise
In regulated industries, the typical Silicon Valley disruption playbook falls flat. “Silicon Valley often has this notion of tech outsiders that come in and single handedly revolutionize a sector. And I think clearly in the healthcare industry, this is something that never works,” Kourosh emphasizes. Instead, Inato invested heavily in building credibility through expertise, creating an “amazing customer success team with dozens of years of pharma experience” to guide pharmaceutical companies through processes that were “partly product and partly still human based.”
- Avoid Single Customer Dependencies
Early enterprise relationships can be both blessing and curse. Kourosh warns about the dangers of over-customization: “What we ended up doing was we focused so much on a single one that we ended up building something that was super customized to them… we ended up doing 90% of our revenue with them and we actually then had to backtrack a ton to be able to understand what is completely specific to this pharma company and how can we actually build a product that fits a need in the market.”
- Focus on Core Marketplace Dynamics First
Rather than trying to build every feature immediately, Inato took a methodical approach. “What was quite unique to us is we ended up focusing on the discovery piece, on the matching piece for a really long period of time,” Kourosh shares. “We’re only now, after about three years, starting to expand to support everything you would expect in terms of the admin work, the legal work, the pricing, the payment, et cetera.”
- Find Investors Who Truly Understand Your Space
Fundraising in complex industries requires finding the right partners. Kourosh explains, “I think what I’ve learned about fundraising is that we often say you need to educate VCs, but I think you can only go so far in terms of education. I think it’s actually often impossible to get a VC excited if you’re in a really complex industry that they’re not passionate about.”
This insight led them to Obvious Ventures, where they found an investor who had already done deep research in their space. “He had been working on the space for a really long time and he started pitching this idea of a marketplace. And after five minutes I told him, well, great, this is what we’re building. And we ended up signing after a week or so without ever meeting.”
The results speak for themselves. Today, Inato works with over half of the top pharmaceutical companies and approximately 3,500 sites across 50 countries, growing revenue by 600% in the past year. Yet Kourosh believes they’re just getting started: “Even though we’re pretty happy about those numbers, what is really exciting to me is that it’s only starting to feel like the flywheel is starting to accelerate.”
For B2B founders tackling complex industries, these lessons highlight the importance of making bold strategic decisions, building deep industry expertise, avoiding early customization traps, focusing on core marketplace dynamics, and finding investors who truly understand your space. Success often requires the courage to start over, the patience to build trust, and the discipline to focus on foundational problems before expanding scope.